Wondering why you don't feel like you're a strategic partner? Human Resources continues to get that dig from executives, so your misgivings may just make you a bona fide HR professional (but not a leader of your organization). Maybe we should start 12-step groups to finally make some headway on this in our profession?
It's really tough, especially in smaller companies, where the executives just want to tell you what to do, especially about compensation. I can tell you, having advised hundreds of companies by now, many executives have limited patience for compensation work(except when it comes to paying execs). When you run into this, it's a sign that your execs see compensation mainly as a budgetary issue. But this point of view diminishes the value of what HR can accomplish, so it's your job to help them see otherwise. If you don't, you'll just be making more headway towards a dysfunctional, non-strategic, partnership.
What can you do to change the cycle? The best place to start is facing your own insecurity. If your executives start a project by telling you what to do and how it should turn out -- rather than identifying the goals they want to achieve with your help -- don't feel you have to just go along. Being strategic means turning limitations into opportunities. HR leadership means going out on a limb to educate your execs about how your company can set its sights higher. Here are a few suggestions:
When the CEO wants answers tomorrow. Seems inevitable if you've got a candidate that you want to hold on to, but you can help make this happen less frequently. Do the best research that you can on total compensation for the individual, then take a breath and put extra time in. Don't just pick up the phone to give the answer and get things over with. Instead put a short deck together. Provide information on the job definition you used and your data sources. Outline the pros and cons of the data you gathered (e.g. how much you had to age the data, your qualms about the job match, the data match to your company size, etc.) and steps you could undertake to make the total compensation target more reliable. Be prepared to discuss the pros and cons of your approach, highlighting the alternatives you have for getting better data or providing more insight into incentive practices. It's a rare executive who won't take the chance to improve her/his decision making, and briefing executives in this way typically builds your relationship with them.
When everyone believes they don't have the time. You barely have time to take vacation. How can you fill out job profiles, price jobs, create a salary structure, train managers how to use all of this and so on? The limitations seem clear. You have too much work to do to take on a full-blown project, so who could imagine any opportunities for you in this situation?
Let's look at it from a different angle. Try defining the ROI on your time investment in the project. You don't really know how much time a project will take until you set a project end date and outline the steps you will take to meet it. For a comparison, measure the payoff for doing the project: How much of your time will be freed up for you once it's completed, how will you use the time and what other opportunities will now be available to you, your managers and your employees as a result of the project? Turning time into money, how much will the project save in the long term? Present this data and discuss your options with your executives.
When everyone believes that survey data is unaffordable. Create an FAQ on compensation surveys and share it. Begin by adding up the hires you made last year above and below the $100,000 salary level. Your CEO wouldn't buy a $100,000 IT upgrade without asking for research beforehand. Why would you hire an employee who is this costly without investigating the research available? Use the previous year's data to highlight all of the salaries, incentives and equity that you have recently committed to. This will certainly help clarify the ROI for survey costs.
With this analysis complete, add Qs and As on the types and costs of surveys available, the data you will have access to and the surveys' pros and cons. Then include a Q and A covering all the ways you'll get a payoff from surveys, since they equip HR and executives to make informed business decisions -- repeatedly -- instead of just examining whether a salary number feels right alongside your dusty three-to-five-year-old salary structure. Take the FAQ along with you to meetings with those who need to give you approval, and work through each Q and A together. Odds are, you'll be teaching them quite a bit about surveys that they wouldn't learn on their own.
Margaret O'Hanlon, CCP brings deep expertise to discussions on employee pay, performance management, career development and communications at the Café. Her firm, re:Think Consulting, provides market pay information and designs base salary structures, incentive plans, career paths and their implementation plans. Earlier, she was a Principal at Willis Towers Watson. Margaret is a Board member of the Bay Area Compensation Association (BACA). She coauthored the popular eBook, Everything You Do (in Compensation) Is Communications, a toolkit that all practitioners can find at https://gumroad.com/l/everythingiscommunication.
Comments